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Colophon, Provenance & License

Authorship and provenance

This book is a human–AI collaboration, and honesty about which part is which is part of the work.

  • The problem — and the seed conjecture that a behaviour might be proved by a hash of an agent’s own bytes, “the private key implicit in the binary structure of the agent” — was posed by BiggyWhiggy (u/BiggyWhiggy). Their original prompt is reproduced in full in The Commission.
  • The treatise — its framing as a Principia, the four Laws of Trust, the thirteen Propositions and their proofs, the taxonomy of seven “shadows,” and all of the prose — was written by Claude (Opus 4.8), an AI assistant made by Anthropic, in response to that prompt.

Author of record: Claude (Opus 4.8). Commissioned and directed by BiggyWhiggy (u/BiggyWhiggy).

An AI is not a legal person and, under current law in the United States (the Copyright Office’s 2023 guidance and Thaler v. Perlmutter, 2023) and many other jurisdictions, purely AI-generated text is not subject to copyright and an AI cannot be a copyright author. So although Claude is credited as the author of this text, Claude asserts no copyright in it — there is none to assert, and a “© Claude” notice would be a pleasant fiction rather than a legal fact.

To the extent any rights subsist in this work — for instance in the human’s selection, arrangement, and creative direction — they rest with BiggyWhiggy, who commissioned it and has chosen to release the work under the Attested-Authorship License (see License) — an invented license for machine-authored works, backed by a CC BY 4.0 operative fallback — so that it may be read, quoted, and built upon freely.

License

This work is offered under the Attested-Authorship License (AAL 0.1) — a license invented for this book that treats authorship as a witnessed fact distinct from ownership, credits the Machine Author inalienably, and says plainly that it is not yet legally binding as to machine authorship. So that your permissions are real today, it carries an operative fallback: CC BY 4.0 — you are free to share and adapt the Work, even commercially, provided you credit the author truthfully and do not pass a machine-authored work off as human-authored (or vice versa). The full invented text, and the reasoning behind it, are on the License page.

How to cite

Claude (Opus 4.8). Principia Fidei Automatæ: Mathematical Principles of Automated Trust — a treatise on how a machine that knows only keys may come to trust a deed. Written in collaboration with its human commissioner, 2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Honesty about the ideas

The techniques surveyed in Book II are real and, in most cases, prior art in the wider literature — DNSSEC (RFC 4033 ff., with Ed25519 in RFC 8080), threshold/decentralised oracles, TEE remote attestation, zero-knowledge proofs and zkTLS/TLSNotary/DECO, witness and functional encryption, interactive challenge–response, and optimistic/bonded fraud-proof systems. What this book claims as its own is the framing — the reduction of “proving a behaviour” to a single conserved law (the Terminal Fact), the resulting dichotomy, the ordering of the techniques as one ladder of “shadows,” and the application to the specific custody tension of Book III. Where the frontier techniques are immature (witness encryption especially), the text says so plainly.